This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The Deterministic Networking (DetNet) Working Group (WG) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) describes a data forwarding protocol (“data plane”) that must signal a flow and a sequence number within that flow to enable replication and elimination. In order to debug a network, an essential requirement is that it can always be possible to identify which node (i.e., network device) generates a certain copy of a data packet and to identify which copy that was generated; for example, in the case of a replicating node in the middle of a path, an identification is needed whether a generated copy was for transmission in the left direction or for transmission in the right direction.